While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems

Review by Wally Swist

In considering Diane Frank’s most recent publication, While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems, what may be most ostensible is not just this poet’s irrepressible lyricism but an imagistic lyricism embedded with what Robert Bly called “the deep image.” Here is a prominent example from the eponymous poem in the book’s first section: 

her cello a call to prayer

with the moon rippling the water

Frank, who plays cello in the Golden Gate Symphony, at her best writes poetry as if she is drawing a bow over the strings of a cello.

In doing so, we, as readers, hear the origins of the human voice in her poems, as in these lines, also from the title poem of this collection:

Suddenly, a sun flower—

the enigma.

A kiss, a gentle sliding,

an oboe, an innuendo.

We hear the voice in the music of her language.  However, she also writes poetry which searches for the answers to questions, as in “Leap,” and we find her seeking “elusive perfect forms—/ in the sky garden of meditation.”  But she also grounds her poetry in what is real.  In the same poem, Frank sees the green flash in an Annie Dillard book,” then upon looking deeper, she observes “over the Temple by the Lake/ at Pokhara, Nepal/ after 24 days of trekking around Annapurna—/ flying monkeys in every direction/ a vision from a Himalayan dream.”

Frank, simply, is the real thing—a guide bringing us to the center of OZ, where she points out the wonder there, then making us realize it really isn’t OZ after all but what was, and is, in front of us all the time.  She is a true 21^st-century visionary poet, and there are few of them as ingenious, integral, or reputable.

“Tree of Life” is a moving elegy, included in the book’s first section among the new poems.  It is an apt blend, again, of craft, lyricism, and imagery.  This is poetry as prayer:

Let his voice ripple

through time.

Where the trunk of a redwood tree

thick with the rings of centuries

was burned by lightning,

shine your light

into the dark world.

Franks also does very well in providing expansive vistas, which then open up pathways in consciousness through her poetry, as in “Somewhere in Tibet or in My Mind,” where “Late at night, I think about atoms and stars,/ layers of infinity.” Then several lines later she muses that “somewhere on a mountain in India or Tibet,/ a monk is chanting sutras and carving mani stones./ He sees what I see/ as a Goddess with a Thousand Arms/ and the mountain whispers her name.”

Hers is a genuine voice.  Exemplary of this are lines from “Kaddish for My Mother,” in which “The wood from the Black Forest/ whispers its secrets./ Priestesses who knew the mysteries/ are chanting from your strings.”  Notice the assonance of “Priestesses” and “mysteries,” how the syntactical structure of that sings.  She concludes this homage as if she were herself bowing with a focused intensity:

When you were a girl, your mother

sang to you every night, two lullabies,

her voice rocking like a cradle in the trees.

Not unlike verses from Thunder, Perfect Mind, from the Gnostic manuscript the Nag Hamadi Library, an exhortatory poem espousing aspects of both Isis and Sophia, dated sometime before 350 C.E., and written in Greek, Frank’s lyricism rises to another octave: “Lean into your cello now,/ with your arms, your heart, your knees—/ the echo of her voice.“

She explores the world as a mystic.  She prefaces her poem “White Butterfly” with a quote from Insight into the World of Butterflies, in which we learn that “in Chinese symbology a white butterfly symbolizes the soul of the departed;” and where:

A hummingbird hovers over pink dianthus

in my Grandmother’s garden.

I remember her hands,

the way she kneaded bread,

what she sang as she was weaving

on the hand loom in her attic.

 

White butterflies hover inside angel wings.

At dawn, everything dissolves

into separate worlds.

“Gifts” is a love poem that may be one of the best contained in the book, one in which her expression of tenderness may even be compared to that of the eminent Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, whom I had the immense pleasure of meeting nearly fifty years ago when he just happened to visit the bookstore that I managed, in the Yale Center for British Art.  Here Frank, similarly, exhibits what I was most impressed with in Amichai, and that was his humility—concomitant with his ability as a poet—and in this, both of them share these kindred poetic characteristics.  “Gifts” begins almost mysteriously: “A small opening/between us/ in the shadows we reflect/ on the wall—/ a heart, a bone.”  But it is in the poem’s conclusion that we experience, as readers, a palpable sense of ecstasy: I trace the bones/ connected/ like wings/ behind his shoulders/ with my smallest finger.”  She makes the expressions of the sensual tacit in her lyricism and imagery but also intimates what is deeper—an ancient inviolability of what can’t be spoken in eliciting touch itself.

However, perhaps the most memorable lines of poetry in Diane Frank’s While Listening to the Enigma Variations appear in “Wild Orchids,” where, like a shaman, she conjures both a Keatsian truth and beauty:

I learn so much from my failures

that I have to bless them.

Sometimes I think we are all Intricate patterns of shell inside rock,

glowing with the memory of ancient lives.

Memories of past lives are also included in her New and Selected Poems. An example especially representative are these lines from “Beyond Walls,” beginning with her walking “into a synagogue in Poland./ It is fifty years ago before I was born.”  However, she ratchets up the resonance in these lines by introducing a historic perspective, a vision from a past life, remembered 2,000 years ago:

We are a human river of white robes

and sandals, with flecks of wheat falling

into the sunlight around our feet.

Around us, the cadence of prayer,

a prophecy, a thunder cloud.

“The cadence of prayer” suffuses Diane Frank’s poetry.  Music also suffuses her work: making music, writing poetry regarding music, even speaking with those who previously have made significant music, such as J. S. Bach, whom she imagines speaking with at the conclusion of one of her finest poems, “Magnificat,” which is also dedicated to the great composer.  This may be the best way of suggesting that as she intimates that listening to Bach’s Cello Suites is a secret pleasure, one of our secret pleasures may be reading the poetry of Diane Frank, as it is reflected in these lines of her poem:

late at night with no one listening.

And sometimes, by the ocean

with the moon glowing toward full,

the old man whispers to me.